What do you say about the outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate who left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child? I take no pleasure in violence and pain. I’m not happy that Jamie Gilt, 31 – who has built a thriving web presence on the argument that guns are not only perfectly safe around kids, but necessary for their protection – left a loaded handgun in reach of her four-year-old son, who then picked it up, aimed it at his mother, and pulled the trigger. I find zero delight in the thought of Gilt’s toddler’s almost certain panic and horror in that moment, nor the guilt he may well carry for the rest of his life (guilt that only his mother deserves). I’m sure being shot in the back really hurts – even more so when it comes with a side of nationwide liberal schadenfreude.
But I have no interest in letting Gilt off the hook. Her child could just as easily have shot himself, or a passerby, or someone else’s child. With just a few tweaks of location and circumstance, he could have shot my child. Someone else still could, accidentally or with intention – it’s a possibility you have to consider in a country with so many guns and so few laws regulating them. That’s the macabre truth of parenting in 21st-century America.
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